review
Anne Rabe’s impressive debut novel is a SPIEGEL bestseller, was shortlisted for both the 2023 German Book Prize and the Aspekte Debut Prize, and continues to receive widespread critical acclaim.
‘The Possibility of Happiness’ follows a woman, Stine, who was born at the same time and place as the author: in Wismar, a small town on the Baltic coast in East Germany, in 1986. Too young consciously to remember much about the time before German reunification, Stine’s questions about that time are consistently met with silence. Stine’s past, including her family’s involvement with and reluctance to let go of the East German regime, are explored over the course of around fifty achronological fragments, in what forms an extended meditation on generational trauma.
The first-person narrative has two main strands – firstly, Stine as a daughter, choosing to sever ties with her abusive mother, and to raise her own daughter, Klara, away from the family home; and secondly, Stine’s life as a writer, investigating the true story of her grandfather Paul’s career under National Socialism and then the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). These plotlines are interspersed with poetry and journalistic reflections on wide-ranging aspects of East German society, from the aftermath of 1989 to the present day.
Rabe writes from a fresh and original perspective, creating well-developed, believable characters, and never shying away from moral complexity. The novel’s fragmentary structure is used very effectively, resulting in a mounting sense of tension throughout the narrative. In one profoundly shocking episode, the protagonist and her brother are made to take an excruciatingly hot bath by their abusive mother. The nature of the maternal abuse has for the most part only been hinted at until this point in the novel, so this sequence comes as a violent and deeply distressing revelation – one that haunts the reader long after they have finished reading the book.
Rabe’s award-winning talents as a playwright, scriptwriter and essayist are brought to bear in this extraordinary work of literature. ‘The Possibility of Happiness’ is a unique literary achievement, combining different forms of writing to form a nuanced and unsettling work that is as erudite as it is compelling.
Rights sold: Turkey, Livera
Find out more here: https://www.klett-cotta.de/produkt/anne-rabe-die-moeglichkeit-von-glueck-9783608984637-t-5465
All recommendations from Spring 2024